Electrically powered vehicles (EV) and battery electric vehicles (BEV) have numerous advantages over fossil fuel cars including reduced emission of pollutants and national dependency on foreign energy sources. Despite these advantages, EVs suffer from short driving range and long charging intervals due largely to battery technology limitations. Accordingly, both widespread adoption of EVs and a charging infrastructure has been limited. Hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) attempt to mitigate the range and charging interval issues by providing an alternate power source, for example fossil fuel or hydrogen.
Typical electric charging stations require the vehicle user to manual connect the car to the station. With the required frequency of charging such manual intervention complicates vehicle ownership and thus vehicle adoption.
Another approach uses near field magnetic resonance induction. This approach suffers from electromagnetic interface and lower coupling efficiency between the power source and the vehicle.
To fully realize the potential of EVs and encourage their adoption, charging should occur with limited or no user intervention as an unconscious task. This requires an intelligent system to transfer power between a variety of power sources and the vehicle. In addition, there needs to be a way to appropriately bill for this service regardless of who is driving the vehicle as would occur with a rental fleet.